GSA launches customer feedback pilot

Hate applying for a passport? Was getting a new Social Security card a pain?

The government wants to know. On Tuesday, the General Services Administration launched a pilot to gather customer feedback and use it to improve the services.

Called Feedback USA, the tool will allow citizens to express their opinions when interacting in-person with State Department passport centers and Social Security Administration offices by visiting a small kiosk upon their exit. The feedback will be given to an agency representative anonymously and in real time.

This initiative stems from the work of GSA’s customer team in the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies to use data to enhance customer experience, the focus of a 2011 executive order and an Office of Management and Budget Cross-Agency Priority goal established in 2014.

The GSA team has been working internally on the Federal Acquisition Service’s Common Acquisition Platform and the Public Building Service’s annual tenant survey. In the case of the latter, the team was able to transform a print-based survey that cost $1 million to put out and that produced little tangible response data into a digital tool tailored to actionable concepts that costs $24,000.

“You need to have something tangible in front of people,” said Victoria McFadden, deputy chief customer officer in GSA’s Office of Customer Experience. “It can’t just be anecdotal evidence. It has to be based on some sort qualitative or quantitative research that points to some specific things people can work on.”

The team — led by Chief Customer Officer Phaedra Chrousos, who is also the associate administrator of OCSIT and 18F — conducted listening tours at several agencies in the past year since its launch and decided in-person feedback was on area in which the government struggles to collect tangible data. McFadden said agencies told her team in-person interaction is like a “black hole.”

Using kiosks from contractor Happy or Not, Feedback USA gives visitors to State and SSA buildings the opportunity to express their feelings upon exiting by pressing one button. The company’s standard interface uses four different smiley face buttons that range from very happy to very unhappy. McFadden said the kiosks have an average response rate of 10 to 15 percent.

McFadden said the compiled data can show deeper trends to explore. For instance, a similar exit survey in Scottish airports indicated traveler satisfaction was much worse on weekends, prompting officials to explore why. In the end, the airports found it was because lower tier supervisors typically worked the weekend shifts, she said. But once managers shifted the schedules with experienced supervisors working on the weekends as well, satisfaction increased.

In the same way, GSA hopes to help its partnering agencies “understand what their customers need and then help them get to those root causes,” McFadden said.

The pilot will run for a year and could expand to other agencies.

The DIA edition

Hashtag intelligence?

The first Marine to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Vincent R. Stewart, made quite a memorable first appearance at the recent Intelligence and National Security Alliance Leadership Dinner. The outspoken general (I expect nothing less of my beloved Corps’ generals) may have introduced the world to the concept of hashtag intelligence when describing how the U.S. intelligence community is exploiting social media.

According to Stewart, Twitter provided the first indication in early June that Houthi rebels had fired a Scud missile from Yemen into Saudi Arabia. “The first warning of that event: #scudlaunch,” Stewart said. “Someone tweeted that a Scud had been launched, and that’s how we started to search for this activity. This is the environment the intelligence community now faces.”

Twitter and Facebook may be enabling new methods of intelligence tipping and queuing, but beyond the monitoring of #scudlaunch, the new DIA director was less forthcoming about the agency’s plans to use social media. “Yeah, there are some opportunities,” Stewart said. “I’ll stop there. Because even though it’s open source and publicly available, I think we might not want to talk too much about some of the ways how we’re exploiting that. Not that any of you all would tell our secrets, but …”

Inside Scoop doesn’t like to be paranoid, but something says that was a smart call.

DIA compromised?

Everybody loves a good spy story — not the Edward Snowden steal-your-secrets-and-run-away-scared-type of spy story, but the deep-penetration-agent type. A mole like Aldrich Ames or Robert Philip Hanssen.

The DIA’s new director also apparently likes a good spy story. In fact, Stewart has his counterintelligence agents actively looking for spies — the electronic and people type — inside of DIA.

“When I took over at [Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace], I made this assumption that our networks were penetrated, that our adversaries had penetrated all of our networks, and if that’s the case we ought to go figure out how we find them, and drive them out of our networks, defeat them in our networks,” Stewart said. “I’ve taken that same assumption going into DIA. That if we’re an organization that’s worth a damn that our adversaries are probably interested in what we’re doing and so we’re probably penetrated. So I’ve asked my Office of Counterintelligence to take a good, hard look at everybody in the enterprise, and they’ve actually put some interesting techniques out there and have surfaced some things that concern us. So we’re investing in counterintelligence because if you’re a first-rate intelligence organization, your adversaries are probably trying to get inside. And so, we’re going to go find them and see if we can drive them out of our enterprise.”

Industry: I have a job for you

Can you model and simulate content? If so, you might want to pitch your wares to the DIA.

“I’ll tell you one area we’ve got to get much better at that the industry can help us with — modeling and simulation,” Stewart said. “Not just modeling and simulation for advanced weapons systems, but modeling and simulation in a way that delivers content, dynamically and interactively, to our users, where a user can look at different variables and think about the decisions as they see it. The days when we can produce hardcopy — bind it, send it — I mean, it’s obsolete by the time we deliver it to the user,” he said. “So I need a significant amount of help in doing modeling and [simulation], not just for the S&T world, not just for the acquisition world, but how we might deliver content in the future. If anybody’s got any help on that one, we’d like to talk.”

What Stewart actually meant to say is email your ideas to DIA’s Needipedia at Ideas2Action@dodiis.mil.

Send me some Hashtag intelligence on Twitter @DanielVerton

Kitty Hawk moment for delivery drones

The first official U.S. civilian drone delivery is now in the history books. On July 17, with approval by the Federal Aviation Administration and under the supervision of scientists from Virginia Tech, drones proved they could deliver supplies to Americans in need, especially in remote areas.

In the small town of Wise, Virginia, a microcosm of the challenges of rural life in Appalachia, a research project dubbed “Let’s Fly Wisely” tested three categories of drone flights. NASA Langley piloted a long-distance (30 miles) flight using its single engine SR-22. That was followed by a mid-distance (1 mile) flight by Australian drone delivery company, Flirtey, using its proprietary hexacopter. And the final leg involved a “line-of-sight” mission with a tethered octocopter developed by my company, SEESPAN.

The remotely-operated deliveries brought vital prescription drugs and medical supplies to the nation’s largest free health clinic, held in Wise by Remote Area Medical.

Together, NASA and Flirtey proved that drones can deliver vital medical supplies to those in need; in doing so, they also proved that low-cost drone delivery can replace high cost traditional delivery methods in the public and private sectors.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe described “Let’s Fly Wisely” as a “Kitty Hawk moment,” one that will go down in history as an important milestone in American aviation.

Beyond this outdoor aviation test in the Appalachian mountains, however, regulators in federal and state agencies remain on the horns of a dilemma: The FAA has allowed commercial drone pilots to fly the aircraft as far as they can be seen with the unaided eye, but it hasn’t resolved how to deal with the problem that free-flying drones often fly out of control.

That’s why the FAA insists on a 500-foot buffer distance from the “non-participating” public. A rogue drone flying at 50 mph can cover 500 feet in less than 7 seconds. Is that enough for a worried public?

That’s one of many difficult questions that must be dealt with. Among other questions: What if a drone is hacked and hijacked for criminal purposes? What if there are software glitches or radio telemetry failures that create runaway drones? What if there are pilot errors creating runaways?

Public officials are grappling with all of these issues simultaneously as drone adoption threatens to race ahead of society’s ability to mitigate those risks posed by drones operating in a modern society.

Businesses already see the advantages of deploying drones to displace current tools. A mere 18 months ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously revealed that 85 percent of the packages the company ships weigh less than five pounds — an optimal payload for a delivery drone and Amazon’s plans for a delivery fleet under the moniker Prime Air.

Unlikely public advocates also emerged: In April 2014, two-dozen major U.S. media companies declared their support for the use of drones for newsgathering under no lesser protection than the First Amendment itself. Clearly, there is passion and motivation for drone use in all sectors of society.

While solutions are sought to reduce risks associated with free-flying drones, it’s possible that most public service drone tasks can be conducted with a tether to control the drone and mitigate risk. If accepted, the potential for tethered drones to improve public service at reduced cost and lower risk are abundant.

They could aid with asset inspection, surveys, emergency response, traffic efficiency, public security, police and firefighter support, image gathering under dangerous scenarios, and even the delivery of life-saving first aid or communications equipment (think radios or mobile phones) to accident victims that are difficult to reach in a crisis.

Tethers aren’t new. They have been used for decades by scientists to moor balloons and kites as they gather data from on-board sensors above.

Some companies have developed tethered systems that enable data transmission (CyPhy Works Inc., Danvers, Massachusetts) from the drone to the ground, or to transmit continuous power (Drone Aviation Holding Corp., Jacksonville, Florida) from the ground up to the drone.

Tethered systems, like SEESPAN’s, assure restraint by connecting the drone to a powerful electric ground-based system that protects the public. It stops runaway drones, prevents hacking, offers rapid retrieval — all while maintaining continuous flight of the drone. The tether is also visible.

Laboratory and flight tests at Virginia Tech demonstrated the tethered system:

• Has the strength to retrieve a drone back to its base even under worst-case scenarios (e.g., the constant force of a 70 mph wind);
• Can stop a runaway drone flying away at full throttle (40 mph); and
• Will rapidly retrieve a drone (e.g., 400 feet in 12 seconds).

The tether’s restraint also enables close proximity operation — allowing it to be flown within 100 feet from Governor McAuliffe as we interviewed him standing in front of the health clinic. Flying close offers substantial advantages: Smaller, lighter equipment can be used on-board to capture video, live-streaming data from the on-board camera via Wi-Fi is reliable and a smaller drone can be used to carry the load.

In 2012, Congress mandated FAA to integrate drones into the civilian airspace by 2015. That deadline will be missed; some experts say it will take years for solutions to be in place. In short, our ability to apply restraint and control over drone flight remain the biggest challenge prior to integration.

Perhaps what the “Let’s Fly Wisely” test also demonstrated is new goal for drones — for nothing new to happen. The drone planes and rotorcraft do their jobs as expected without incident, giving hope that one day these airborne robots will conduct our daily routine tasks at far lower costs, greater efficiency, and lower risk to society. That might seem boring to most.

Hopefully, soon, the next new “Kitty Hawk” moment will come where all things drones operate without incident, proving we are ready for full integration into the national air space.

Drones can be eyes in the sky searching for missing persons, first eyes on dangerous situations like hazardous material spills, or other major accidents, firefighter and police actions.

Even mundane tasks can be done more efficiently, at lower risk and cost, such as surveying roofs and exteriors of public buildings, and public outdoor assets, such as water supply systems or wastewater treatment facilities. With tethered control over the drone, federal and state chief information officers can have access to drone technology today without the risks that come with free-flying drones.

Mark Ryan is Founder, President and CEO, SEESPAN, Inc.

U.S. CIO: Agile IT remains ‘immature’ in federal government

Despite its hype, agile IT practices can’t yet flourish in the federal government, the U.S. chief information officer said.

“I think we’re immature as an industry in really understanding the context in which agile can survive and thrive in a large organization,” U.S. CIO Tony Scott said Tuesday at a Partnership for Public Service event. “We’ve all seen examples where you get a great experiment going and then the antibodies come out and kill it, because it doesn’t look like, it doesn’t walk like, it doesn’t talk like something we’re familiar with.”

By that, Scott means cultural resistance is still agile development’s biggest barrier in federal government. Even though groups like the General Services Administration’s 18F are piloting major agile projects, such as its newly launched agile blanket purchase agreement IT procurement vehicle, the “calcified” waterfall development rituals, as Scott referred to them, are hard to break.

To successfully deliver with agile, the U.S. CIO said the government must “be careful of the context and make sure you set up the right conditions for success.”

Scott stumbled upon agile delivery early in his career: While he was developing software related to theme park attendance in 1979, he was able to work with his customers to rapidly meet their needs. He said, since then, he’s had to carefully structure teams to encourage the same environment.

“As a manager and as a leader, I think setting up the right context and creating the right conditions for success is the most important thing for a leader to do,” he said. “The failure to do that will often lead the inevitable, unintended consequences.”

Agile is not a panacea for faulty IT acquisition, said Brian Reynolds, managing director of Grant Thornton’s global public sector division and another speaker at the partnership’s event. In a later panel, Kathryn Edelman with 18F said agile is great, but “it isn’t the be-all, end-all — it’s not the chicken noodle soup — of all the challenges we face in government.”

“We don’t want to abandon good practice here,” Reynolds said, arguing that traditional waterfall development still has value in certain contexts. Agile, though, works best “where we have uncertainty,” he said. “When we really understand what we want to do up front, then we really need to think about waterfall … or traditional ways of delivering systems. There, we’re focusing on efficiency.”

Scott agreed that agile doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the efficiencies found in methodologies like waterfall.

“As agile began to take momentum in our profession, some thought of it as an excuse to get rid of things that are just good practice,” he said. “With every new wave, everybody thinks it’s an opportunity to throw out everything and then sort of start over.”

On the contrary, Scott said successful agile development will draw from the successes of traditional techniques.

“Some of the best agile projects I’ve been associated with are ones that borrowed liberally from all the good known practices in waterfall — we just didn’t do waterfall,” he said.

White House makes push to increase diversity in tech workforce

The White House announced a series of new commitments Tuesday designed to increase diversity and entrepreneurship among people looking to find work in the tech community or start their own company.

Federal agencies, state and local governments, nonprofits, venture capital firms, and companies big and small announced efforts to attract more people of all backgrounds to the U.S.’s tech boom.

“We’ve always had founders and innovators from every group, men and women, people of all racial groups, all ages, all parts of our country, but they haven’t always had access to the deep entrepreneurial resources and venture capital at the same rate as each other,” U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith said in a call with reporters Tuesday.

The efforts range from expanding coding and on-boarding programs to ensuring better recruitment and hiring practices, adding to the White House’s TechHire program and other financial commitments, like federal grant and training programs.

The announcement came in conjunction with the White House’s first Demo Day, which brought in more than 30 startup founders from across the country who showcased their innovations for President Barack Obama.

Agencies like the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department all announced efforts tied to the Demo Day. Those efforts included:

• $4.4 million in awards to 88 startup accelerators through the SBA’s Growth Accelerator Fund. The SBA also announced 27 prizes of each $50,000 to cities and Native American communities with the goal of enabling entrepreneurs to quickly create a business.

• The NSF will scale up its Innovation Corps program, which provides entrepreneurship training for NSF-funded scientists and engineers. Similar I-Corps programs will be expanded or launched at the National Institutes of Health, the DOD, the National Security Agency, the Department of Agriculture, DHS and the SBA.

• The Energy Department will train 100 undergraduate and graduate students in technology transfer and entrepreneurship over the next three years. It will also hold a “National Lab Week” at its 17 national labs, with the goal of exposing 1,000 young people to STEM and technology commercialization.

• The Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration will launch a $10 million grant program for state and local governments, nonprofits, universities and other organizations to help build capacity for people looking to create companies and obtain capital.

• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will extend its Patent Pro Bono program, which provides free legal assistance to in-need inventors who want to file a patent, to all 50 states.

On top of those efforts, 10 new cities and states Tuesday joined the TechHire Initiative, which helps communities partner with companies to find new ways to fill open technology jobs by recruiting and placing applicants based on their skill set. Akron, Ohio; Birmingham, Alabama; Cincinnati; Lynchburg, Virginia; Maine; New Orleans; Oakland, California; Pittsburgh; Rhode Island; and San Jose, California, joined the 20 cities initially announced in June. The administration plans to add another 10 cities and states by the end of the year.

Private companies announced a number of hiring commitments, including an effort by 40 venture capital firms to participate in a survey that will track diversity within their own companies as well as those they fund. Diversity within VC firms has been a hot button issue over the past year, with Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers winning a highly publicized gender discrimination trial against former senior partner Ellen Pao. Kleiner Perkins is one of the VC firms participating in the survey.

Tech companies also committed to a number of diversity-driven hiring practices, including the use of the “Rooney Rule,” a statute borrowed from the National Football League that states teams (or companies, in this case) must interview minority candidates for senior positions.

Cloud storage provider Box, social network Pinterest and document management company Xerox all committed to using the Rooney Rule to reach their own diversity goals. Amazon, Dropbox, IBM and Microsoft also announced efforts to increase their workforce diversity.

“To maintain our lead as the best place on the planet to start and scale a great company, we must ensure that vibrant startup ecosystems emerge in every corner of America, and that all Americans, including those underrepresented in entrepreneurship like women and people of color, are both encouraged and able to fully contribute their entrepreneurial talents,” the White House said in a fact sheet distributed Tuesday morning.

Read about all of the commitments and announcements on the White House’s website.

New NASA challenge seeks early warning system for earthquakes

NASA is looking to a community of more than 800,000 data scientists and developers to find a way to detect earthquakes before they happen.

With the help of Appirio’s TopCoder community, NASA is in the midst of a two-week challenge in which users are tasked with creating algorithms that could uncover electromagnetic pulses that may precede earthquakes.

The Quest for Quakes challenge is taking data gathered by sensors in areas of the world that are regularly impacted by earthquakes. The data, which comes from QuakeFinder — a humanitarian research project of aerospace engineering firm Stellar Solutions — measures electromagnetic signals from earthquakes near the San Andreas Fault and other faults in California, Chile, Peru, Greece, Indonesia and Taiwan. QuakeFinder has released 3 terabytes of data on an Amazon Web Services cloud for the challenge.

The relationship between electromagnetic pulse and earthquakes is highly debated among those who research the natural disasters. One theory suggests that fracturing rock in the Earth’s crust creates an electrical pulse that travels to the surface and makes a small change in the local magnetic field. However, researchers often have to deal with fuzzy data due to a number of natural and human-made electromagnetic “noise” sources, such as lightning, solar storms and commuter trains.

“Developing a reliable approach that can separate potential earthquake-induced electromagnetic pulses from the myriad of natural and anthropogenic sources has been a significant challenge,” said Craig Dobson, program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a release. “We look forward to seeing the innovative ideas from this competition and learning more about this controversial phenomenon.”

These complex problems are often why NASA turns to TopCoder to tap into its 800,000-person community. Mike Morris, a general manager at TopCoder, said the agency has been tapping into TopCoder since 2010 when faced with a problem its own researchers can’t solve.

“A lot of what they are trying to solve is potentially unsolvable problems,” Morris told FedScoop. “Researchers know that what they are trying to do may not be possible, but when they are running their experiments, they would try to solve a problem with a limited set of solvers [and they] weren’t confident in their failures.”

“So when they heard about our model, it was a way to be able to launch a challenge on TopCoder, get hundreds of people to solve it at the same time, come up with all different approaches, and at the end of it, if it didn’t work, they would be confident that it was an unsolvable problem,” he said.

Winning teams will receive a share of $25,000, with $10,000 going to first place winners. Quest For Quakes is open until Aug. 9.

FCC misses E-rate deadline for school, library Internet upgrades

The Federal Communications Commission has missed its own deadline to funnel money into schools that need wireless and Internet upgrades as part of the federal E-rate program, which offers high-speed broadband discounts in schools and libraries.

The Universal Service Administrative Company, an independent arm of the FCC that tracks E-rate filings, originally set a deadline for Sept. 1 to get the funds — around $3.9 billion — to schools across the country so they can start installing access points and performing other work this school year. But the deadline has now been moved to Sept. 24, according to Funds for Learning, which helps schools navigate the process.

“Getting the funds out as quickly as possible is very important,” John Harrington, CEO of Funds for Learning, told FedScoop in an interview. “The sooner they can get the money committed to the schools, the sooner [the schools] can move forward with getting wireless access points installed.”

As of July 31, funding commitments for this school year totaled more than $930 million, according to USAC. There were roughly 26,000 applicants.

Harrington said in previous years, the FCC did not have a hard deadline to transfer money to schools — and sometimes the process would stretch out for a year or more, which meant schools did not have Internet access and upgrades they needed. Many times, schools would resubmit bids the next year for the same project.

The FCC changed its process and set a goal for money to switch hands early in the school year after analyses showed that schools would use the money more wisely if it came in a timely manner.

“There was a very strong correlation, if a funding commitment was issued in a few months, it got utilized,” Harrington said. “But once you got past that, the rate went down.”

School technology officers and administrators also have to deal with a new system through which to request funds for the 2016-17 academic year, which is becoming a burden for some, Harrington said.

“Only a third of applicants have been able to get signed up into system so far, so there are some startup challenges associated with this,” he said. “It’s an ‘off-the-shelf’ system they adopted to get it up and running quickly.”

As part of a “data cleanup” effort to provide more transparency of funding streams, applicants can follow and keep track of their yearly requests online, and applicants will be able to compare prices for similar services, which will help fuel more competition among providers.

“This effort will have no effect on the pace of funding decisions,” officials wrote of the new system. “Cleaning up the existing data — and working to supply accurate data going forward — will clearly have benefits for all applicants.”

For the current application window, the FCC granted 21 appeals and waivers and denied 36 appeals made by schools that missed deadlines or filed the forms incorrectly.

Successful appeals and waiver requests were granted if schools encountered unforeseen circumstances beyond their control. Appeals were denied if invoices were not submitted on time, or if there were clerical errors.

This year marked the first time funding was available for hardware purchases and wireless access points since 2012. E-rate was overhauled this year after the FCC approved a $1.5 billion annual funding increase for the program, raising the spending cap from $2 billion to about $4 billion.

Reach the reporter at corinne.lestch@fedscoop.com or follow her on Twitter @clestch.

Jason Matheny named IARPA director

Jason Matheny has been named director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, according a release from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Matheny had been serving as director of IARPA’s new Office for Anticipating Surprise, overseeing research efforts to develop new capabilities for a range of events relevant to national security. He was also overseeing three IARPA programs: the Open Source Indicators (OSI) program, Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) and Forecasting Science and Technology (ForeST).

Matheny joined IARPA in 2009, when he started off helping grow programs related to forecasting geopolitical events. He helped create SciCast, the world’s largest science and technology forecasting tournament, which was run in partnership with George Mason University.

Before joining IARPA, Matheny worked at Oxford University, Princeton University, the World Bank, the Center for Biosecurity and the Applied Physics Laboratory, and he is the co-founder of two biotechnology companies.

“Jason brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the position and I’m confident that he will continue to maintain the high bar for technical excellence and relevance to our Intelligence Community mission,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement. “I look forward to him continuing to work closely with partners throughout the national security community to bring to bear our future capabilities.”

IARPA is known for high-risk, high-payoff research that looks to leverage forecasts or predictions to provide the country with a technological edge over adversaries. (We’ve written about some of their more recent projects and challenges.)

Matheny takes over for Peter Highnam, who left IARPA in July to run the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s InnoVision program.

Modular IT: Making the government a better customer

In June 2012, the White House issued guidance intended to make the U.S. government a better customer of information technology. This came in part from a document, Contracting Guidance to Support Modular Development. It showed the government’s attempt to encourage and embrace a variety of commercial industry trends that were yielding better results for IT investments.

Among the practices encouraged by the White House was agile, the collaborative and iterative development methodology that’s been adopted in private sector for some time. The guide also encouraged modularization. In part, that means acquiring and/or engineering software with reuse in mind and as a driving consideration. That can mean being ever conscious of the “build vs. buy” decision, with greater emphasis on the search for what is available before building. It also means, if “build” is the choice, to build and deliver IT investments based on modular frameworks that can be developed, delivered and tested in smaller chunks than has previously been the norm in government projects.

Taking agile to a higher level

The federal government guide references commonly available project-level information focused on execution of projects. It also applies that guidance to a higher program level, where it discusses how to structure acquisitions so that they benefit from agile and modular methodologies. The guide suggests improvements in the contract award structure, such as breaking large contract awards into a series of smaller ones, allowing acceptance criteria to be applied earlier in the process, with payment more solidly tied to success criteria.

One size does not fit all

Over the years, the Department of Defense, as an example, seems to have swung between extremes of strictly prescriptive versus only informative guidance regarding contract acquisition. The government’s attempts to be prescriptive were intended to promote best practices and avoid repeat failures of the worst kind, such as lack of using version control systems in software development.

A challenge with being prescriptive is that it assumes that “one size fits all” with respect to what is being prescribed. Best practices aren’t static. They evolve quickly over the years, far more so than federal government guidance information. The prescriptive and specific nature of earlier government contract guides might help bad vendors avoid the most obvious pitfalls — but it doesn’t make them good. Meanwhile, being prescriptive can stifle innovation of better vendors that have evolved their own practices to a state more mature than the government would prescribe (enter waivers).

The 2012 guidance information reflects a more intelligent and balanced approach. The guide discusses various factors, methodologies, contract styles and acquisition approaches that might previously have been prescribed by a contract. But it now does so in a way that is more amenable to interpretation. That approach strikes a balance between promoting and institutionalizing good practices while not falling prey to the illusion that good guidance can fix a bad vendor, the kind that contributes to boondoggles. The wording promotes awareness and taking advantage of new and emerging technologies and trends as part of acquiring IT.

Shenanigan reduction

In addition to guidelines related to modularization and agility, the guide discusses considerations to avoid contract situations that shift undue risk to the government customer or that give unfair advantage to particular vendors in competitive situations. For example, the guide suggests that a vendor helping develop requirements for IT acquisitions tries to avoid writing requirements in a way that unfairly drives business to that vendor.

Reading between the lines, one might read into the guidance information a set of war stories of a once-bitten, twice-shy customer. The hope is that better awareness will make the government customer wiser.

Continuing the theme of avoiding a once-size-fits-all mentality, the 2012 guide also discusses improving how the government leverages competition among vendors to benefit the taxpayer. It recognizes both the value of competition and the costs of arranging for competition. Delivering actual taxpayer benefits from competitive bidding remains a challenge for the government.

What’s missing? Security!

Other than referencing the Information Security Office in the User Acceptance Testing section of a sample Performance Work Session in the appendix, the guide does not promote security considerations. In an age of growing cyber warfare and potentially cyber terrorism, it seems that guidance discussing the acquisition of IT investments should at least reference security in a meaningful way. Security represents a risk to those investments that needs to be better understood.

Clearly, the security needs of various government agencies differ, and specific guidance on IT security comes from other government sources as well. But perhaps the next update of contract guides will include a discussion on the degree of security necessary in various contexts and stress its growing visibility and general importance.

So, is it working?

Three years later, it appears that at least some of the guidance is indeed having a beneficial impact. Although the information available to this author is related to only some government contract situations, some government agencies are clearly being smarter about purchasing IT services and working with IT vendors to manage projects according to modern, modular, and Agile tenets.

Changing the large-scale IT purchasing behaviors of so many government agencies takes time. In my work with both government agencies and vendors since mid-2012, there are clear signs that both government customers and vendors are focused on making better IT investments for at least some government agencies.

C. Thomas Tyler is a senior consultant at Perforce Software.

New VA CIO orders formation of cybersecurity strategy team

In one of her first official actions since assuming the duties of chief information officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs on July 6, LaVerne Council has ordered the formation of an Enterprise Cybersecurity Strategy Team and tasked them to deliver a strategy to Congress by mid-September.

“We have an aggressive schedule and we are focused on delivering this strategy to Congress within the next 45 days,” Council wrote in a July 31 email obtained by FedScoop.

The ECST comprises leaders, subject matter experts and support staff from different parts of VA’s Office of Information and Technology. The team is led by Susan McHugh-Polley and work has already commenced, according to Council.

The team’s scope includes management of current projects, such as the Continuous Readiness in Information Security Program as well as development and review of VA’s cybersecurity requirements and operations holistically — from desktop to software to network protection. The ECST is also coordinating its efforts with the Department of Homeland Security, the Government Accountability Office and the VA’s Office of the Inspector General.

“The ECST team members are working with their colleagues and managers to determine who will address their normal daily responsibilities while they focus on the cyber security mission,” Council said. “Please offer your support. We can no longer perform in an environment where we do not have the proper controls, processes and management to ensure that our technology data and environment are as secure as possible.”

McHugh-Polley joined VA in 2014 as the executive director for field operations for service delivery and engineering, which directs all operational and maintenance activities associated with VA’s IT environment. Prior to joining VA, McHugh-Polley served as the director of the operations division for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security.